Editor’s Note: This series was originally published by Alex Funk on the TimeGhostArmy forums (original URL – https://community.timeghost.tv/t/canada-and-the-battle-of-the-atlantic-part-2-edited/1434).

Sources:

• Far Distant Ships, Joseph Schull, ISBN 10 0773721606 (An official operational account published in 1950, somewhat sensationalist)
  [Schull’s book was published in part because the funding for the official history team had been cut and they did not feel that the RCN’s contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic should have no official recognition. It is very much an artifact of its era, and needs to be read that way. A more balanced (and weighty) history didn’t appear until the publication of No Higher Purpose and A Blue Water Navy in 2002, parts 1 and 2 of the Official Operational History of the RCN in WW2, covering 1939-1943 and 1943-1945, respectively.]
• North Atlantic Run: the Royal Canadian Navy and the battle for the convoys, Marc Milner, ISBN 10 0802025447 (Written in an attempt to give a more strategic view of Canada’s contribution than Schull’s work, published 1985)
• Reader’s Digest: The Canadians At War: Volumes 1 & 2 ISBN 10 0888501617 (A compilation of articles ranging from personal stories to overviews of Canadian involvement in a particular campaign. Contains excerpts from a number of more obscure Canadian books written after the war, published 1969)
• All photos used exist in the Public Domain and are from the National Archives of Canada, unless otherwise noted in the caption.

I have inserted occasional comments in [square brackets] and links to other sources that do not appear in the original posts. A few minor edits have also been made for clarity.

Earlier parts of this series:

Part 1 — Canada’s navy before WW2

Part 2 — The Admiralty takes control

Part 3 — The professionals and the amateurs

Part 4 — 1940: The fall of France, the battle begins, and the RCN dreams of expansion

Part 5 — The RCN’s desperate need for warships

Part 6 — New ships, new challenges

Meanwhile at sea, for a year or more, HMCS Saguenay and a handful of other River-class destroyers had conducted Canada’s naval war virtually alone. Since spring they had fought beside Royal Navy warships against submarines prowling the coasts of Britain as part of the anti-invasion fleet. When the ships and RAF Coastal Command planes made things too difficult there, the U-boats moved west. With Iceland now available as a base (after the British invasion in May 1940), the aircraft and escort ships followed them.

The five Canadian destroyers remaining in Britain (Assiniboine, Ottawa, Restigouche, St. Laurent, and Saguenay), were employed escorting outbound convoys to their dispersal point, roughly 12-15 degrees west, and then returning with inbound convoys to harbour. On December 1 1940 while escorting a convoy, Saguenay was struck on her port bow by a torpedo fired by the Italian submarine Argo: she was the first Canadian naval vessel hit by an enemy torpedo. The ship was nearly sunk, with a bent propeller shaft, a major fire amidships, and a section of the bow broken off. The crew were able to keep the ship afloat and moving at a modest two knots. Five officers and thirty-five crew were evacuated to the RN destroyer Highlander to reduce potential casualties in case of another torpedo attack; and throughout the night and most of the next day a skeleton crew fought fires and kept the hull from further flooding. Tugs arrived later that evening, but the ship had built up to a respectable six knots by that point and the commanding officer decided she could carry on under her own power. At noon next day she rounded the north coast of Ireland with the fires out and her steering gear back in operation. She triggered an acoustic mine as she approached Barrow-in-Furness, and with new stern damage and salt water contaminating her remaining fuel, she had to accept a tow, and reached port on December 5th.

HMCS Saguenay near Montreal in 1932.
Clifford M. Johnston / Library and Archives Canada / PA-056550

Saguenay lost twenty-three men and sustained grievous injury to her hull but she had done the job she was supposed to do: the speed with which her guns went into action, said an Admiralty report, had forced the submarine to dive and prevented it from attacking any merchant ships. More and more Canada’s rapidly expanding navy was being forced into a new way of thinking, moving away from pre-war training and ideas. Sink U-boats when possible, but above all protect the convoy. Now Saguenay would be out of action for several months while the repairs were effected. Six destroyers had grown to seven with Assiniboine in October 1939, then back to six with the loss of Fraser in June 1940. HMCS Margaree (originally HMS Diana) had been purchased from the British to replace Fraser, but had been lost herself in a collision with a freighter at night in October 1940 with the loss of 142 of her 176 officers and crew. It was her first escort mission. Skeena was refitting in Halifax, leaving only five RCN destroyers to support the anti-submarine campaign.

Saguenay‘s involuntary removal from active service happened around the same time that help finally began to arrive from two sources. One was from the arsenal of a friendly neutral, the other from Canada’s own shipyards. The “Four-Stackers”, 50 overage destroyers given by the United States in exchange for 99-year leases on British bases in the Americas, began to arrive in December, 1940. Prime Minister Mackenzie King had been involved in the deal from the beginning, often acting as an intermediary between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The Americans were also pressing for basing rights in Canada and President Roosevelt wanted the Canadians to receive some of the destroyers being transferred. The Canadian government was not interested in granting base rights for what it felt was a small number of “ancient” destroyers, but the navy was told to prepare for them should they be forthcoming. The RCN was unenthusiastic — the ships were not considered to be as suitable as the River-class ships currently in service, and were unlikely to be of any long-term value at all.

Acting Captain (later Rear Admiral) H.G. DeWolf, Director of Operations in Halifax in late Summer 1940, recalls that the navy only grudgingly accepted the deal after Admiralty pleas for the RCN to take at least some of the ships. Canada accepted seven of what became known as the Town-class (the RN designation), six of which were named for Canadian rivers, the seventh, HMCS Hamilton, saw some RN service before transfer to the RCN, retaining her British name. As the American ships arrived in Canadian ports en route to the UK, the new crews were struck by American generosity; every inch of storage space was crammed with provisions now only a memory in England. There were bunks instead of hammocks; there were typewriters, radios, coffee-making machines. Unfortunately, there were also defects which quickly became apparent at sea. The lean, four-funnelled destroyers, emergency vessels laid down during the last year of the First World War, had been built in haste for a less technical conflict. They were not sufficiently maneuverable against U-boats and their sea-keeping qualities left much to be desired. Their narrow beam and shallow draft made them difficult to handle in rough North Atlantic weather. The mess deck bunks, for all their pleasant appearance, made exorbitant demands on the men’s crowded living space and their steering gear was flimsy and cranky. Any ships were better than no ships however, and although seldom loved and frequently hated by those condemned to sail them, four were sent to bolster the destroyers already operating in British waters. They would eventually form a crucial element of the fleet’s escort forces by virtue of their few positive qualities: they were fast and well-armed. Commodore L.W. Murray went with them and took command of all Canadian ships and establishments in the UK.

HMCS Columbia, originally US Navy destroyer USS Haraden, transferred to the RCN through the “destroyers for bases” deal.
Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-104178

[Editor’s Note: One of these four-stackers ended up with a fantastically varied post-transfer career: HMCS Leamington started as the USS Twiggs, becoming HMS Leamington in the destroyers-for-bases swap, was then transferred to the RCN (excitements in Canadian service included two collisions at sea and at least one near-sinking due to ice buildup while on winter convoy duty), then back to the RN, then she became a Soviet destroyer called the Zhguchi (“Fiery”), returned to RN service in 1950, then was temporarily renamed HMS Ballantrae for the film Gift Horse (released in North America as Glory at Sea), which was a fictionalized re-telling of the St. Nazaire raid in the HMS Campbeltown role, then finally sold for scrap in 1951. That is a full naval career!]

The autumn and winter of 1940 also saw the first of Canada’s new corvettes waddle their way down the St. Lawrence river into RCN service.

Returning to the Autumn of 1939, for purely RCN purposes, the navy estimated that around 40 anti-submarine vessels were needed over three years. Since some of the requisitioned ships were suitable for local duties, not all of the new vessels need be corvettes. It was also necessary to establish a rate of exchange if the smaller ships were to be bartered for Tribals. Quick resolution of these issues was essential if the full complement of the RCN’s first planned expansion phase (two Tribals, twenty corvettes, and twelve minesweepers) was to be in commission by Spring of 1940, as the Naval Staff hoped. The RCN did not get off the mark as quickly as it wished. Detailed drawings needed to begin construction of corvettes did not arrive from Britain until early 1940. The placing of orders was also complicated by the requirement that the navy deal with contractors through a third-party, the War Purchasing Board (later the Department of Munitions and Supply). In fact, the lack of official links to manufacturers and the interposition of another department between NSHQ and industry seriously complicated the process of modifying specifications in light of rapidly changing requirements.

Editor’s Note: J.L. Granatstein wrote of the creation of this ministry in Arming The Nation: Canada’s Industrial War Effort, 1939-1945 (PDF), emphasis mine:]

…the Liberal government of Mackenzie King in June 1939 had passed the “Defence Purchasing, Profits Control and Financial Act” which aimed to control profits and the costs of defence contracts. Profits could not exceed 5 percent, a stipulation that meant that soon after the war began, C.D. Howe, the Minister of Transport, told the House of Commons that Canada had not managed to place a single contract. The Act had also created the Defence Purchasing Board to coordinate purchases, and in its short life (July 14 to October 31, 1939) the Board managed to buy only $43.7 million worth of goods, with three-quarters of the orders placed after Nazi Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939 and Britain and France had declared war against the Hitler regime on September 3; Canada had followed with its own declaration of war one week later.

One of the first casualties of the Second World War was this system of profit controls, quickly repealed so that war orders could be placed. A second casualty was the Defence Purchasing Board itself, replaced on November 1, 1939 by the War Supply Board, led by Wallace Campbell, the president of the Ford Motor Company of Canada. Initially, the new Board fell under the control of the Finance Minister, but in mid-November, in a fateful and fortunate move, the Board came under the ambit of the Minister of Transport, the just-named Minister of Munitions and Supply, Clarence Decatur Howe. Howe had no department as yet, only a title. But when the War Supply Board was swallowed by the new department on April 9, 1940, just days after the King Liberals’ election victory, Canadian war production had found its czar.

The first Canadian orders for corvettes were not placed until February 1940, when fifty-four were contracted to be built. Of these, only twenty-four (roughly equivalent to first expansion phase) were intended for RCN service. The remainder were to be bartered for destroyers. Ten more corvettes were ordered by the RCN before the end of the month as replacements for some of the requisitioned auxiliary ships and to maintain a steady rate of construction in Canadian yards. By the end of February the First Construction Program was completed: sixty-four corvettes and twenty-four Bangor minesweepers (completion delayed until August 1940, as not enough qualified builders could be found right away). When the barter scheme (corvettes-for-Tribals) fell though in March 1940 because an exchange rate could not be agreed upon, the RCN found itself “holding contracts for considerably more corvettes than it intended to build”. The contracts could have been cancelled, having only just been signed, but the RN agreed to take ten of the vessels being built in Canadian yards, lowering the total for Canada down to 54, only seven more than what the navy had intended to have by 1942 anyway. For this reason, as well as political and economic pressures, the orders were allowed to stand. In August 1940 another six corvettes were ordered along with ten more Bangors to maintain continuous work in the shipyards (and to help retain the skilled workers).

Marc Milner continues:

What this embarrassment of riches meant was an acceleration of the navy’s hitherto cautious expansion plans and the jamming of three years of careful growth into less than two. Small wonder, then, that the personnel requirements overtook projections. Despite this, it is doubtful that the prospect of commissioning extra auxiliaries troubled anyone at NSHQ, particularly when the failure of the barter scheme was followed by the news that the British would allow the construction of Tribals to Canadian accounts in UK yards. The latter ensured that the main thrust of fleet expansion would go ahead. Two Tribals were duly ordered in 1940 and two more in early 1941, but none was completed in time to meet the requirements of the first expansion phase. As an interim measure, the navy requisitioned three small liners, Prince David, Prince Henry, and Prince Robert, and converted them to armed merchant cruisers (AMCs). The Prince ships remained the RCN’s most powerful units until the first of the UK-built Tribals were commissioned in early 1943.

HMCS Prince Robert, one of the RCN’s three armed merchant cruisers. All were converted to other roles later, and two were returned to civilian use after the war.
Photo via http://www.airmuseum.ca/rcn/princes.html

The matter of building Tribals in Canada was never wholly abandoned. The navy was well pleased with its arrangements of a British supply, but long term plans called for more than four. In April 1941 the subject of building Tribals in Canada was discussed once again by the Naval Council (the administrative and policy body of the naval service, chaired by the minister, with senior Naval Staff officers as members). The engineer-in-chief, Captain G.L. Stephens, advised against attempting such complicated building in Canada in the middle of a war. It was bound to be a long and expensive proposition, he warned, if for no other reason than that it was hardly worth tooling up industry to produce specialized steel plate and equipment for so small an order. Moreover, Stephens believed, construction of Tribals was likely to tie up manpower and resources which could be better used. Nelles agreed with his engineer’s views but felt that if such ships could be built in Canada, the navy should not waste its time on smaller “stepping stones”.

The problem had also been considered by the government. [The Minister of Defence for the Naval Service, Angus L.] Macdonald, was under considerable pressure from politicians and the press in his home province to secure wartime capital investment in Atlantic Canada. Indeed, although Canada was prospering from the war, an incredibly small percentage of new capital investment found its way eastward (just 2.5 per cent by 1944). Of the major wartime ship contracts let by May 1941, only three — all corvettes ordered from Saint John Ship Building and Drydock Company — were placed in the Maritimes. Mackenzie King wanted contracts for merchant ships let to Halifax shipyards, but Macdonald preferred destroyers. Without the latter, he explained in a letter to C.D. Howe, the dynamic minister of Munitions and Supply, the merchant ships would not get through. Macdonald wanted building in Halifax “confined to destroyers”, which were “all in all, the best type of escort.” Howe, who had survived the sinking of the SS Western Prince in December 1940 while on his first trip to Britain as minister of Supply, needed no convincing of the need for ships — or for escorts. Further, Howe, like Macdonald, wanted some construction undertaken soon in order to stabilize the employment situation for ship-repair workers, and thereby establish a pool of skilled labour for use in an emergency. Since the government was determined to build something, the navy was happy to support the construction of Tribals. Owing largely to the need to retool industry, it was not until September 1942 that the first keel was laid, and in the rush to complete the hulls, the Tribals drained manpower away from essential ship-repair tasks: quite the opposite of the original intention, and precisely the fear expressed by the navy’s senior engineer.

[Editor’s Note: J.L. Granatstein also discussed the RCN’s efforts to obtain Tribal-class destroyers:]

The growth was as rapid in naval construction which eventually employed some 30,000 workers. The first orders for corvettes, the Royal Canadian Navy’s main anti-submarine and convoy escort vessel, were placed in February 1940 and the first ten keels were laid that month. By the end of the year, 44 corvettes had been launched and an even dozen were manned. In all, 206 corvettes were built in Canada, most on the east and west coasts but many in Great Lakes ports and on the St Lawrence. At the same time, Canadian yards built frigates and minesweepers, tugs and landing craft, motor torpedo boats, patrol boats, and Tribal class destroyers. The last class of ships, greatly desired by the Navy, was the shipbuilding equivalent of the Lancaster, a step too far.

Half as big again as the destroyers with which the RCN began the war, the Tribals were heavily armed and fast, almost as powerful as a light cruiser. The Navy secured four such destroyers from the Royal Navy (Haida, Athabaskan, Huron, and Iroquois), but it wanted more and, late in the war, it secured Munitions and Supply’s permission to build four Tribals in Halifax yards. It was a quantum leap forward from constructing corvettes and frigates to building Tribals and, while they were completed, none was in the water and crewed before the war against the U-boats had ended on V-E Day, May 8, 1945.

Hull of an RCN corvette (probably HMCS Moncton) under construction at Saint John Drydock and Shipbuilding Ltd.
Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-104134

Returning to Winter 1940, the Towns were being taken into service, the first corvettes arrived, and the RCN’s River-class destroyers returned to ocean convoy escort duties. With the U-boats now operating from the Atlantic littoral and with the adoption of pack tactics, losses to convoyed shipping had been mounting during the second half of 1940. From the outbreak of war to February 1940, only seven of the one hundred and sixty-nine ships lost to enemy action had been sailing in convoys. In August, the U-boats began attacking at night and on the surface in the style of torpedo boats: losses jumped quickly. In September alone, forty of the fifty-nine U-boat attacks on shipping were directed at convoy targets. With the adoption of these tactics by the Germans the “Battle of the Atlantic”, as it captured the popular imagination and forms the basis of this study, finally began. The intensification of the U-boat campaign on Allied shipping eventually forced a reallocation of all available ships to escort duty.

Editor’s Note: As the first of Canada’s new corvettes joined the fleet, it’s worth getting a look at the cultural differences between the “real navy”, the professionals of the RCN, and the very different “hostilities only” officers and ratings of the RCNR and the RCNVR, as related by James B. Lamb in The Corvette Navy:

Canada’s second navy was a much different force: a bunch of amateur sailors, recruited from every walk of civilian life, manning ships deemed too small for command by professional naval officers. The ships — Algerines, corvettes, frigates, Bangors — were as cheap as they could be built, and their officers and men were involved, not with admirals and captains, but with characters like Two-Gun Ryan, Harry the Horse, Death Ray, Foghorn Davis, and The Mad Spaniard. It was an amateur, improvised, cut-rate navy, the little navy, Canada’s other navy, manned by amateurs like me.

The division between the two navies was surprisingly complete and clear-cut; few regular career Canadian naval officers ever kept watch aboard a corvette, and only a handful of corvette crewmen were RCN ratings. For shortly after the outbreak of war, a strange process began. The little handful of professional naval officers — all that the country possessed and the only Canadians trained over long peacetime years to fight a war at sea — were bustled ashore into offices. There they presided over clerks and typists in a series of administrative posts for which they had received no training at all. Most of them never went to sea again.

Their places afloat were taken by a handful of former merchant seamen, now officers of the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve, and by young men in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, many of whom were culled from offices ashore and most of whom had never been to sea before. It was a situation worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan: trained seamen were put in offices ashore and trained office managers were sent to sea. As a result, Canada’s professional naval officers were to play an ever-diminishing role in the Battle of the Atlantic.

This curious situation had been brought about by a miscalculation of the role the corvettes could play in the naval war. Originally they had been regarded as a stop-gap, and, as such, unworthy as commands for Canada’s few, and precious, trained naval officers. Apart from those allowed afloat in the RCN’s handful of pre-war destroyers, permanent-force officers were hoarded ashore against the time when the new super-ships would appear to fight the glorious Armageddon against Germany’s powerful surface fleet.

[Editor’s Note: By the time the professionals got their hands on the “real” ships they’d been waiting for — Tribals, then cruisers and even an aircraft carrier — there was no German surface fleet left to fight, and the scruffy, disreputable amateurs had ended up being the ones to fight the real battle: the one that mattered after all.]